Online audio platform Pocket FM claims that long-form or serialised fiction storytelling similar to TV series dominated consumption on the platform, accounting for over 90pc of listeners’ time spent. Pocket FM has a community of 80 million listeners worldwide.
Speaking with Medianews4u.com, Ashu Behl, Senior Vice President – Content, Pocket FM, stated, “Longform audio series entertainment has actually found the right product market fit with the users globally; secondly, it breaks away from the monotony of music, which audio had to offer so far; and third we have been able to crack a right monetisation model as well with this kind of content.”
He added that they had audio books, audio podcasts and audio series. They started to experiment with all three formats and realised that other formats were way behind. People never wanted to pay for podcasts as there was no uniqueness, differentiation in the kind of content offered and the information shared there was available on YouTube for free.
Audiobooks too were audio adaptations of written literary work which exists in the market, it could be read anywhere, with the same audiobook available with multiple players.
Audio series was one unique area where there were no players in the domain, according to Behl. With significantly higher engagement compared to other two formats, Pocket FM started building this format and went deeper into it. The kind of monetisation they used to get in audio books was minimal compared to audio series, explained Behl.
He remarked, “We are a freemium platform; we don’t have an annual or monthly subscription model. With a pay-as-you-listen kind of model people pay only for the content they listen to. Audio series have been able to build that level of engagement with the users, where even if I don’t give you an episode for free, you will want to pay to listen to it.”
He added that audiences spend more than 110 mins a day on audio series.
Pocket FM claims to have witnessed 10X growth in content revenue, using micropayment-led monetisation. Monthly transactions exceeded a million in November 2022.
Creators and Content
On the creator end, a lot of people have shown interest in writing and creating series for Pocket FM in audio and written format, says the spokesperson. The brand claims to have crossed 5,00,000 creators.
Among the various genres, the biggest share is of male drama – any kind of action, thriller or stories led by male protagonists; second and third are quite close, one is romance, appealing to a large mass female across India and global markets and the third is fantasy.
Pocket FM offers content in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, besides creating English native content for Indian English users and US English users.
“We are trying to build and create the widest audio series Library. Today I can claim that we have the widest but globally also you want to create a library which suffices our consumer’s expectation. We are building that library across markets, genres, languages and sub-genres,” underlines Behl.
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